


A House A Home

by bomberqueen17



Series: Two-Body Problem [15]
Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Domestic, Eggnog, Found Family, Gen, WIP Amnesty, holiday fluff, not an au
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-12-30
Updated: 2015-12-31
Packaged: 2018-05-10 08:00:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 18,772
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5577547
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bomberqueen17/pseuds/bomberqueen17
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John decides to buy an Earth safehouse, and hosts everyone for the holidays. </p>
<p>Non-contiguous, but in continuity with, Two-Body Problem.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Be It Ever So Humble

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this probably two years ago now, and I've been waiting for a moment and inspiration to strike in order to finish it before posting. But there's so much done. I just want to put this up here, since Two-Body Problem in general has been on such a long hiatus. I promise, even if this doesn't have an ending (which it may by the time I get it all posted), it won't be a cliffhanger.

Ronon drank, staring meditatively at the skyline of the alien city, while John puffed and leaned on the railing next to him. Banks had left late last night, on leave, visiting family. She’d offered to take him with her, but he’d known she wasn’t really ready for that; their relationship was too new. Ronon didn’t really feel ready for that either. Not that he didn’t want to be serious with her, but that he really wasn’t sure he could keep his cover story straight through the intense interrogation that was sure to result from being introduced as a new boyfriend.

“I need Earth practice,” he said, watching the faint glow of the lights at the fronts and backs of the self-propelled wheeled vehicles as they moved across the bridge in the dawn light.

“I been thinkin’ about that,” John said, wiping his face on his shirt as he straightened up. “And actually, my solution for it just came through. You wanna take a trip?”

“You got somethin’ planned?” Ronon asked.

“Yup,” John said.

“I need papers,” Ronon said.

“Been workin’ on those,” John said. “Actually you just need a military ID, and we already made those up. I’ve just been waiting to get one for Kanaan, actually.” He shrugged, and grabbed his ankle to pull his leg up and stretch his quad. “Trickier than I thought, since he was briefly an enemy combatant. But it’s all sorted out now, and the other paperwork I was workin’ on came through too.”

“What other paperwork?” Ronon asked.

“You’ll see,” John said. “It’s a whole-team-plus-Emmagens mission. Teyla already said she could come.”

“Cool,” Ronon said. “What do I need?” He hesitated. “Do I have to dress stupid?”

“Not totally stupid,” John said. “But, um…” He tilted his head, considering as he stretched his other quad. “I’m making Teyla wear a whole shirt. Maybe you should too. That’s about it. Can’t see as it matters beyond that, where we’re going.”

“Weapons?” Ronon asked.

“Nothing you can’t hide,” John said. “People get leery about ‘em. Best not to bring ‘em.”

“Fine,” Ronon said, mentally inventorying his knives. “When do we leave?”

John shrugged. “Nineish,” he said. “We gotta be there before ten.”

 

“Hey,” John said, catching the door frame to arrest his forward momentum. “Rodney. Field trip today!”

Rodney looked up, squinting at John. “Field trip? To where?”

“Earth,” John said.

Rodney gave him a Look. “We’re already on Earth.”

“It’s a surprise,” John said, unable to keep himself from laughing at Rodney’s expression. “C’mon, it’s Team, we’re all going.”

“Hm,” Rodney said.

“All, plus Kanaan and Torren,” John said. “C’mon, I need you to help me ride herd on the aliens. We gotta give ‘em some Earth practice.”

“Why now?” Rodney asked, overly suspicious.

John sighed dramatically. “Because Kanaan’s paperwork just went through,” he said. “And the surprise I was working on just went through, too. C’mon. We’re leaving in ten. Just put some civvies on and remember not to bring a gun.”

“I have,” Rodney said, waving his hand at his computer monitor.

“Leave it,” John said. “We’ll be back before night anyway. C’mon, I have clearance and a flight plan filed and everything. It’s for really real an AR-1 mission.”

“On Earth,” Rodney said.

“Yes,” John said. He waggled his eyebrows. “But they gave me clearance to fly a puddlejumper.”

“Who’s they?” Rodney asked suspiciously.

“Well,” John said. “Me, mostly. But Woolsey rubber-stamped it so it’s legit.”

“Really,” Rodney said. “Earth by puddlejumper.”

“Yup!” John grinned. “It’s going to be awesome. Meet me in ten in the jumper bay.”

 

Using a jumper to fly around on Earth was an unconscionable extravagance. Rodney was almost relieved to discover that they’d gotten permission mostly because it was the ever-cranky Jumper 22, which was scheduled for a number of short hops with a technician on board. Rodney’s presence was not just desired for the mission, but necessary, given the jumper’s condition, which John had failed to mention but which was totally like him.

Rodney settled himself under the dashboard, bitching happily; it was nice to be repairing something, and the peons he’d delegated 22 to were, predictably, ham-fisted and wrong, wrong, wrong. Saying so wasn’t as satisfying as if they were there, but it was entertaining. Especially to glimpse Kanaan’s face as he watched the others to see what they thought of all this.

John took her up smoothly, despite the wonky left drive pod, and Rodney took a moment, lying under the dashboard and watching the readouts on his laptop, to admire the man’s skill. John had an instinctive sort of genius that let him perform complex calculations in his head and arrive at the answers without really being consciously aware of the math he was using. He was terrible at explaining, but Rodney could clearly see now what he was doing, coaxing the left drive pod and feathering the right with little touches, guiding the recalcitrant machine into an almost-perfect takeoff.

“A little bumpy,” Teyla said, sounding surprised.

John grinned tightly, giving his impression of breeziness, but Rodney could tell he was a little bit wounded. “You can see what’s wrong, can’t you?”

“I’m actually amazed we’re moving in a straight line, let alone in a consistent attitude,” Rodney said. “You know the only reason I got in this thing is that the inertial dampeners are totally functional.” He raised his head and spoke to Teyla, moved by the little tightness in John’s face. “John’s actually doing an amazing job. This thing isn’t working properly at all and you can barely tell. The math he’s doing in his head is incredible.”

“You call that math, huh?” John asked lightly, but his voice was a little strained. “Feels like there’s some kinda short or feedback or somethin’.”

“Yeah,” Rodney said, suddenly absorbed again in the maintenance, “I see it now. Take us up a little higher, can you?”

“I gotta watch commercial flight paths,” John said. “Remember that. This is gonna be a real short flight, Rodney. We can joyride later. I got a rendezvous at 1000 on the ground.”

“A rendezvous,” Rodney said, perking up with interest, but then he was distracted by the readouts, and went back to taking readings. He’d do the repair work when they set down; he had to get at the exterior of the drive pod. For now, he just logged the anomalies. “Yeah,” he said in a moment, “it’s a feedback loop situation. Getting harder to fly?”

“A bit,” John said tightly, still grinning. “I mean, no big deal, but the thing really doesn’t want to go straight.”

“Well, no wonder,” Rodney said, and was slightly uncomfortably aware that a lesser pilot probably would have lost control at least once in the last fifteen minutes.

“We’re almost there,” John said, “so I’m gonna take her down. If you need more readings we can get them on the return journey.”

“Is there a safe place for me to work when we get there?” Rodney asked.

“I think so,” John answered. Rodney noticed for the first time that everybody was standing and looking out the front viewing port at the sprawl of an American suburb. He hauled himself up on the dashboard and blinked in confusion.

“Where the fuck are we?”

“Suburb of San Francisco,” John said. He pivoted the jumper with incredible precision and brought it straight down into, of all things, the slightly overgrown backyard of a big house, between a stockade fence in desperate need of a paint job and a trio of gnarled fruit trees in need of pruning. Oh, it was spring in the real world, Rodney realized.

“Whose house is this?” Rodney asked, shutting his laptop and shoving it into his bag.

“You’re about to find out,” John said. “Now, everybody, you’re gonna follow me out onto the street and pretend like we were just peeking at the backyard but we came in a car or something that’s parked down the street. We’re going to wait for our rendezvous on the porch in the front of the house.”

“Seriously,” Rodney said, frowning, “whose house is this?”

“That’s the point of this rendezvous,” John said with sweet patience.

Torren fussed and cooed, and Kanaan soothed him; Ronon moved to stand by the exit, visibly checking for his blaster and hesitating when he didn’t find it, then checking something at the back of his belt instead, which was most likely a hidden knife. John dropped the jumper ramp and moved in front of Ronon, looking around to see if anyone was watching. He made an all-clear hand signal and squared his shoulders, stepping down from the jumper ramp and walking backward to look in at all of them.

He looked happy, Rodney thought, and then it struck him he hadn’t seen the man look happy in a long time. He was thinner, cheekbones sharper, eyes shadowed, and his civilian jeans hung off him, low on his hips as ever, but belted tighter than formerly. Something was up, and Rodney realized he was a bad friend to only just now be noticing this. It had been a while since John had been quite right.

Now his hair stuck up irrepressibly and he was actually grinning, a real honest grin, as he slouched, hands in pockets like he rarely allowed himself in uniform, looking around the backyard like a guy in someone’s backyard, not a soldier in a jungle half-expecting an ambush. “C’mon,” John said, and Rodney filed out after the others and followed John around to the front.

“Whoever lives here isn’t much of a gardener,” Rodney said, looking at the wild tangle of overgrown weeds that had once been a charming cottage garden set around the patio in the back of the house. A set of multi-paned French doors, badly in need of paint, opened out onto a set of wide stairs and down onto a paving-stone patio set with flowerpots of weeds.

“She was,” John said, “but after the kids moved away, and her husband died, and her arthritis got bad, she couldn’t really keep it up. The neighbor’s daughter helped her for a while but then she went off to college.”

“Is this your grandma’s house?” Rodney asked.

“I would love to meet such a woman,” Teyla said, sparking with interest.

“No,” John said, shaking his head, “both my grandmas are long dead. Her name is Anna and she doesn’t live here anymore.”

“Then who does?” Rodney demanded.

Teyla looked amused. “Let me guess,” she said, and turned to John. “We are about to find out.”

He grinned at her, and she smiled back, her sweetest-amused smile, and Rodney wondered if she knew why John had been so off lately. She probably did, she was good at people. Rodney wasn’t good at people.

They went through a cute little gate that had obviously once been cheerfully painted in several colors, that had new hinges but a broken latch, and came down a newly-paved driveway that had no cars in it. A veranda wrapped around the other side of the house and came to the front, with turned wooden railings that bore traces of bright paint, and sturdy but worn steps. The garden beds here were wildly overgrown as well.

“I like this place,” Ronon said abruptly, and put his hand on the bannister of the porch steps with a strange, almost reverent aspect.

“Yeah?” John looked pleased.

Ronon took his hand off the railing and rubbed the back of his neck self-consciously, as if he’d put his hand on the bannister without realizing. “Yeah,” he said. “It, um… It looks like my auntie’s house.”

“Really,” John said.

“Yeah,” Ronon said. “Only, well, different colors. And I mean, different plants, and hers was partly made of stone I think. It was really old, far outside the city.”

“So it did not really look like this at all,” Teyla pointed out kindly.

“Look may be the wrong word,” Ronon said. “Feel.”

“Yeah,” John said, “that’s what I was thinkin’.”

Rodney sighed and sat down on the front steps, pulling out his laptop and beginning to analyze the data from the jumper. “I have a lot of repairs to make,” he said, “so I hope this rendezvous doesn’t take too long.”

A sudden noise, a jangling sort of beeping noise, startled all of them, and for a moment they looked around, trying to determine its origin. Finally John made a face and fished into the pocket of his jeans, and pulled out a cellphone. “That’s me,” he said, and stared intently at it a moment before swiping his finger across it and holding it tentatively to his ear. “Sheppard,” he said.

Rodney began to laugh and laugh and laugh, and the three Pegasans traded quizzical looks. “We’ve been gone so long we’ve forgotten about cellphones,” he said.

Teyla reached into her jeans, which looked strange yet incredibly hot on her (predictably), and pulled out a smartphone. “I find them interesting,” she said. “But I have only mastered the most basic of functions. Still, I wonder, with so many choices for alert sounds for them to make, how does one recognize one’s own alert and know it does not belong to any other?”

John had walked away a few paces, and was peering down the street. Rodney realized he was signaling to someone. “Oh,” Rodney said, “I think our contact is here. With any luck it’s someone deep, dark, and secret from John’s past, here to reveal a great mystery to us.”

“Oh,” Teyla said eagerly, catching on, “perhaps it is a long-lost aunt wishing to reveal that he has inherited great wealth.”

“Sheppard’s family’s loaded,” Ronon said, and they all turned to look at him. “What? I saw the house. It was like three of this one. And platters and platters of free food, more than even I could eat. Drink too. And livestock, they had livestock. Big four-footed things.”

“Horses?” Rodney asked, remembering something John had once said.

“Maybe,” Ronon said. “Glossy. Docile. Looked like good eating.”

“So it won’t be a revelation of wealth,” Tina concluded, while Rodney was still goggling about eating horses.

“I figured they were pretty well-fed people,” Ronon mused, “most of ‘em, but his ex-wife, she was real skinny. Bones. Her new husband must not be much of a provider.” He shrugged. “The Earth histories I read said that’s how it works on this planet but I didn’t figure it would be polite to ask her about it.”

Rodney boggled at that for a moment, and then John was walking back toward them with a woman in a tweed suit with a briefcase. John hooked his thumb over his shoulder, indicating her. “This is Jodie,” he said. “Jodie, this is the gang— Ronon, Rodney, Kanaan, Teyla, and the little one is Torren. They’re all civilian contractors in the Air Force with me, and they’re all foreign.”

“I’m not foreign,” Rodney bristled.

“Yes, you are, eh?” John said. “They barely speak English in Canada.”

“Pff,” Rodney said. He’d honestly forgotten for a moment that countries were a thing.

“So they’re the ones you told me about,” Jodie said. She had a slightly squeaky voice. “I’m so glad to meet you all. Well, I just need your signature on a couple of things, Mist— er, Colonel Sheppard, and then we can finish this up.” She set her briefcase down beside Rodney, opened it, and pulled out a manila folder.

“Wait,” Rodney said slowly as she presented it to John, along with a pen. “Did you—“

“Yup,” John said, scanning down the document and flipping the page before scribbling at the bottom of it and handing it back to Jodie.

“What?” Ronon asked.

Jodie beamed and handed John a key fob and a slim folder. “This one’s the front door,” she said, “and this is the back, and this one, well, I think that latch on the gate broke, but you could probably get it re-keyed.”

“First thing on my list,” John said, grinning at her as he tucked the folder under his arm.

“You _bought_ it?” Rodney yelped.

“We needed an Ear— a US safehouse,” John said. “Figured a few coats of paint, a little work, and then we got someplace everybody can crash when we’re Stateside. Especially since there are startin’ to be families.”

“This is your house now?” Ronon asked, still quiet but suddenly keen-eyed, something in his posture going ready like a hunting cat.

“Yeah,” John said. “Bought and paid for.”

“Congratulations,” Jodie said, beaming. John shook her hand.

Realizing his mouth was working like a fish’s, Rodney closed his jaw. “You bought this house,” he said.

John nodded again, and looked solemnly from Teyla to Ronon to Kanaan and back to Teyla. “Now you have someplace to be from,” he said. “I know your homes are gone now, destroyed, and there’s nothing to be done. And I know you’re at home on the base. But we have no say in where we’re posted in the future. And who knows what’ll happen. I just wanted there to be somewhere for us all to come back to.”

“That’s really sweet,” Jodie said, and Rodney noticed that while he was talking she’d checked out John’s ass (which despite the looser fit of the jeans, did look pretty fantastic, small and tight above the long lean curves of his thighs— Rodney looked away and glowered disapprovingly at Jodie). Great.

“I’m a sweet guy,” John said drily, looking at Rodney for some reason.

Unaccountably Rodney blushed, and a little analytical part of him wondered why John was having this effect on him, and the analysis ran and came back and said that John very frequently had this effect on him and the only reason he hadn’t lately was that they hadn’t been in close proximity. That seemed ridiculous to Rodney, but when he thought about it, he couldn’t actually remember his last in-depth conversation with John. Which might go some way toward explaining why he hadn’t noticed how unhappy or unhealthy or both John had been lately.

Fortunately Ronon enfolded John in a boisterous hug, which was distracting enough for Rodney to get his composure back. “This is awesome,” Ronon said.

“I was hoping you’d like it, buddy,” John said. He looked at Jodie. “Ronon was just sayin’ it reminded him a lot of his auntie’s house from when he was a kid.”

“Never went back after the cull— the, um, the thing,” Ronon said. “But it was probably burned when everything was levelled. That’s what happens when you resist them.”

Rodney had been expecting a slip, but Ronon was good. Jodie looked horrified. “War is hell,” John said lightly, pulling a grimace. “So here’s a place where, I’m hopin’, we can be away from war, a little bit at least.”

Jodie beamed politely, gestured toward the door, and said, “Welcome to your new home. You have my card if you have any further questions or issues. Why don’t I leave you to look around?”

“Thanks,” John said, and Rodney glared to make sure Jodie didn’t check John’s ass out too much on her way back to the sidewalk. John didn’t watch her go at all, but went up the steps and stood looking at the keys. “First order of business is getting a shitload of copies of this made,” he said.

“We don’t have a car,” Rodney said.

“True,” John said.

“We can’t exactly run errands,” Rodney went on.

“True,” John said, “except that I have a phone and the number of a cab company and the addresses of a hardware store, a grocery store, and a liquor store all within 100 feet of one another and about a half-mile of here. So there’s that.”

“God,” Rodney said, “it’s like you know tactics or something.”

“Right?” John said. He unlocked the door, lower lip pulled into his mouth, and pushed it inward.

Ronon was on their six, Rodney noticed absently, and Teyla was flanking John. She had a flashlight in her hand already. John smiled at her and flipped the lightswitch. “Anna only finished moving out a couple days ago,” John said. “I already had the utilities transferred over so there was no shutoff. Don’t need the pilot relit or anything. She was a sweet old lady. I paid her last couple weeks of utilities so she wouldn’t have to be out by the first of the month.”

“You sweet-talked her,” Rodney said.

“I felt like somebody ought to,” John said. The entryway had a doorway to the left and the right, and a stairwell winding up to a second floor landing. The place was partly furnished. “I bought a bunch of her stuff, too. Whatever her kids didn’t want. She was going into a home, there was no room for anything. I’ll replace most of it, probably, but I thought, hell, I have nothing. She was real sweet and had good taste.” He pointed. “Kitchen to the right.”

“Earth homes are so big,” Teyla said.

“The ones we’ve been in, yeah,” John said. “Anna had ten children who survived to adulthood, of her own, and had her sister’s three for a good long while as well. This house was to hold all of them. She had trouble selling it because she didn’t want to subdivide it into apartments or have it gutted for office spaces, and nobody really wanted a house this size. I figured it was about perfect.”

It was bright enough in the kitchen not to need the lightswitch. There was a breakfast nook in a bay window looking out onto the driveway where it narrowed into the path to the garden. John turned on the lights under the cabinets. “The appliances are old,” he said. “Anna warned me the fridge is on its last legs and the oven’s not as even as she’d like. She left me her everyday dishes, which are mostly mismatched but make a fairly complete set for about fifteen. All the good china and silver went to the kids, of course, along with the small appliances.”

Ronon went to the fridge and opened it; he knew what those were. “Hey,” Ronon said, “there’s a lot of beer in here.”

“Really?” John craned his neck and looked over. “Hey, so there is.” He reached in and pulled out a bottle of white wine. There was a note attached to the neck. He unfolded it and read, and bit his lips. Rodney took it from him.

“This is a great house,” Rodney read, “and we hope you love it as much as we did. Love, Anna’s kids.”

“She left a few old armchairs and a beat-up couch in the living room,” John said. “A couple of beds and a bunch of sheets for them. Nothing new, nothing special, all old and worn, nothing that could be donated or that anybody else would want. And a lot of the shelving units and things, her husband had made custom to fit spaces in the house. I figured, I’m not much of a carpenter, I’m happy to leave it like that.” He reached into the fridge and pulled out a few bottles. “Who wants a beer?”

“Hell yes,” Ronon said.

There was a six-pack each of Bud, Coors, Anchor Steam, and to Rodney’s delight, Molson Canadian. “How did they know?” he asked, accepting one.

“I told them there was a Canadian,” John said smugly.

“Amazing,” Rodney said.

“I have not had this,” Kanaan said warily. “What is it?”

“It’s very good,” Teyla said. “It is mildly alcoholic but very refreshing.”

Kanaan turned the bottle of Coors around in his free hand, the other planted across Torren’s back. The child was quiet in his sling, but had woken and was watching everything alertly. “What do the words say?” he asked.

“It’s just the name of the beer,” John said. “There are different brewing companies that make them. That one’s called Coors. It’s brewed in Colorado, which is where Earth’s stargate has been located for some time.”

“Yes,” Kanaan said, “Colorado, I remember that. Is it far?”

“Not really,” John said. “Well, depends how you travel. On foot it’d be a hell of a hike.”

“I forgot,” Kanaan said. “How many people live on Earth?”

“Six billion,” Ronon said.

Kanaan and Teyla stared at one another for a long moment. “We’re out on the far edge of the galaxy,” Rodney said, “and our stargate was buried for thousands of years. The Gou’auld didn’t know we were here. The Wraith have never come here. The Ancients hid this planet, more or less. We have been alone, untouched except for the damage we’ve done ourselves.”

Kanaan nodded slowly. Torren fussed and Teyla took him. John sat at the kitchen table and looked at his copy of the deed to the house.

“Wow,” Rodney said quietly. John looked up. 

“I know,” he said. He pushed to his feet. “Well, who wants to see the whole thing?”

It was a big house, rambling and old, L-shaped with the patio tucked in the back and a rambling wing of bedrooms. There was a den, a dining room, and a living room, as well as a walk-in pantry with glass-fronted shelves. There was a basement, with a root cellar and a laundry room and a staircase that led up to a lean-to shed in the backyard that was home to battered garden tools and an enormous array of pots. There were only two and a half bathrooms, two upstairs and one downstairs, plus a weird little shower setup next to the garden shed, partially enclosed.

“How much of this is normal?” Kanaan asked quietly.

“I dunno,” Ronon said. “I think it’s all pretty awesome.”

John shrugged. “I wouldn’t know normal if it bit me,” he admitted.

They eventually circled back to the kitchen and sat around the breakfast nook table, drinking their beers. (Everyone but John had a second one, and Torren had a bottle of milk.) John had a set of almost-blueprints, drawn by the late husband at some point and left in a notebook by Anna along with a series of notes on the perennials in the garden and a few other house issues. Rodney sat next to John and made notes in his laptop.

“Needs work on the electrical system,” Rodney said, “and some of the plumbing really ought to be updated. Old clay pipes in a few places. Two and a half baths isn’t going to cut it, not with the proportion of adults you’re expecting. The third floor could totally be made into a really sweet TV room and storage area, for sure. And I think you should put a deck on the second story where the lower roof protrudes, looking down to the patio.”

“I figured more bathrooms,” John said. “One more per floor should do it. But yeah, the electrical’s no good. And the furnace is on its last legs and the roof needs work. I really didn’t pay that much for the place, and the realtor thought I was paying too much even then, but c’mon.”

“I didn’t realize you had that much saved,” Rodney said. He knew the pay scale for the US Armed Forces pretty intimately; John couldn’t even be making $70k in a year.

“Yeah,” John said, pulling at his beer, “apparently my mom left me a trust fund when she died and my dad just never told me.” He shrugged. “Bought the place in cash and have enough left over to do a pretty damn good renovation job on it, even with a new roof and new furnace, so I’m not too worried. Figure I’ll insulate it and put in solar too, why not?”

“And there’s enough room to park a jumper in the backyard,” Ronon said. “That’s pretty sweet.”

“It is,” John said, grinning.


	2. I'll Be Home For Christmas

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Several months later...

There was a tall man in a leather coat, with dreadlocks, climbing on old Anna Johansen’s porch roof. Mrs. Nellie Gunderson peered out her second-story window, twitching her lace curtains in astonishment. What on earth was such a crazy-looking guy doing on Anna’s house? Her hand twitched toward the phone before she remembered that it wasn’t Anna’s house anymore. Dear old Anna had gone to live with one of her seven sons or four daughters, Mrs. Gunderson couldn’t remember which, about four months ago, and had sold the house, but the new owner was so seldom about (one of those absentee landlords, she and Ned Chang in the house on the other side had agreed disapprovingly) that neither of them knew what he even looked like.

Could this be him? Mrs. Gunderson wondered, watching the man. He was enormous, probably six foot seven, and of some sort of dubious ethnicity— Mrs. Gunderson herself was black, but this man, she really didn’t know what he was. Maybe he was just a white guy with dreads, it was hard to tell. He wasn’t dressed like a biker but he wasn’t dressed like a regular person either.

He was clambering around the edge of the roof like he wasn’t afraid of heights at all, or like he had no sense, probably the latter, and seemed to be occupied with doing something to the gingerbreading at the edge of the roof. There was another man below him, a dark-haired, sharp-faced man, maybe Arabic or something, very attractive, looking up with his hands on his hips. Were they doing construction? Neither one was dressed as she’d expect a construction worker to dress. Well, the one on the ground looked like he was wearing jeans, but they were absolutely immaculate jeans, as if they’d never even been washed.

It took Mrs. Gunderson another good quarter-hour or so (during which the climbing man shed his coat and was revealed to have absolutely gloriously-muscled arms, sleek and golden and just bulging with muscle, suitable for watching all day) to realize what they were doing. And that, she only figured out because the man on the ground disappeared onto the porch for a moment, and then suddenly the entire edge of the porch roof lit up.

Oh. Christmas lights. They’d been winding Christmas lights through the gingerbreading.

It looked like the absentee neighbor was in residence for the holidays.

Mrs. Gunderson called Ned Chang immediately. “The neighbors,” she said without preamble. “It looks like somebody’s moving in. Did you see what they were doing, just now?”

“No,” Ned said. He was in his late seventies, about Mrs. Gunderson’s age, and had lived there twenty years. She’d lived here almost fifty now, had moved in just after Anna. “Oh! They’ve decorated the porch! Well, doesn’t that look lovely?” It was a gray day, and it was true, the colored lights shone beautifully from the worn and faded gingerbreading.

“One of them was climbing on the roof to do it, like he hadn’t the sense God gave a gnat,” Mrs. Gunderson said. She had the cordless handset for her phone, and climbed slowly down the stairs, holding the bannister tightly— her knee, ever since that car accident, hadn’t been so good— and peered out her stairwell window, which looked into one of the windows in Anna’s house. The lights were on, all through the house, all three stories, and she could see activity, people moving around inside, though she couldn’t see anyone in particular. “Place is as busy as a kicked ant hive. But I don’t see any cars! Where did all these people come from?”

“Hang on,” Ned said, and she could hear him walking around through the phone. “Hm. There’s a car in the driveway, I can see it on this side. Only one, though. How odd, I didn’t notice it arriving. I was out earlier, though, I just got home. Oh, Yee’s has started making their eggnog, I was going to call and tell you.”

“Oh,” Mrs. Gunderson said. “Oh!” Yee’s deli had the best eggnog, but they only made it for a little while around the holidays— and it wasn’t like so many stores nowadays that started selling holiday nonsense in October, now, they were serious about it and it was only during a couple of weeks of December and that was just it, no more. “I’ll have to tell my daughter.”

“You’d better,” Ned chuckled drily. “Oh, they’ve a baby— I just saw, in the window, there’s a little baby, not more than a year old. Oh, how nice to have children in the neighborhood again.”

“Are your grandkids coming for Christmas?” Mrs. Gunderson asked.

“No,” Ned said. “No, I’m visiting them. Yours?”

“My daughter’s family is coming over, but my Joseph is still deployed, and James’s wife wanted to spend the holidays with her family, so they’re going there,” Mrs. Gunderson said.

“Ah,” Ned said. “Well— I’m having Jenny Park come over to turn the lights on and off sometime and take in the paper. I’ll only be gone a week. Just so you know, if you see her.”

“Oh, I love Jenny,” Mrs. Gunderson said. “If you think to, tell her to stop by sometime while she’s seeing to your house. I always have cookies for her.”

“I’ll tell her,” Ned said. “I’m leaving Tuesday. We have until then to solve the mystery of who the heck all these people in Anna Johansen’s old house are.”

“I will keep you posted,” Mrs. Gunderson said, and said her goodbyes and rang off, leaving the phone on the kitchen table. She checked on the casserole she was making for dinner, and sat down at the table for a moment to rest her aching knee. From here she could watch Anna’s front porch, and she could see the tall dreadlocked man was standing there still, with a dark-haired man who wasn’t the same one who’d been helping him before. Three men, and a child less than a year old, was the count so far, and what the heck kind of family was that?

She could see the dreadlocked guy clearer, and he sure wasn’t a white guy, but he wasn’t black either, and he was definitely young. The guy he was talking to was definitely white, a little older maybe, in his thirties or so, she couldn’t be sure. His hair was strange, standing up in strange spikes, but he was dressed somewhat normally in worn jeans and a hooded sweatshirt. They were talking about something, and Mrs. Gunderson realized that what was in his hand was another box of Christmas lights.

The dreadlocked man turned and looked right at her, and saw her, and nodded politely. She sat back in startlement— the etiquette was that you pretended you couldn’t see into other people’s homes. He was talking to the spiky-haired man now, and the spiky-haired guy looked over at her, then away, and answered him.

The Arabic-looking guy came out again, and sure enough, he was holding a baby, too young to walk but old enough to hold his head up and look around alertly. The baby was multiracial and heartbreakingly adorable, with big curious dark eyes and chubby cheeks, and his tiny face lit up to see the Christmas lights and he reached one tiny chubby hand out toward them, cooing in delight.

All three of the men, to their credit, looked enchanted by this, and smiled sort of stupidly at the baby, the way besotted adults did when children did cute things. Any one of them could be that child’s father, Mrs. Gunderson thought, but she didn’t know whether she should approve or disapprove yet. It depended on what the mother was like, she supposed. Surely there had to be a mother. Unless they were a gay… triple? What was the three version of a couple? Well… it was within the realm of possibility, she supposed, but it would surely be confusing to be their neighbor.

The timer beeped and she stopped it, and went to get Mr. Gunderson ready for dinner. It took him a long time to get ready for anything, nowadays.

By the time she had him installed at the table and dinner dished up and herself all sorted out, the porch next door was entirely bedecked with lights (fortunately not the obnoxious blinking kind) and there were bows around the lower porch railing, and all three men had disappeared inside.

She forgot about it for a little while, but after supper, when she and her husband had settled down in the den to watch the nightly news, her doorbell rang. It took her a moment to register what it was, it was so unusual to have callers unexpectedly nowadays— everybody called first now, they all had phones in their houses and their cars and their pockets and everywhere now— so it took her rather longer than was polite to get to the door.

It was the spiky-haired white man, looking a little self-conscious, standing on the porch. “Hi,” he said. “Sorry to bother you so late, things were just so hectic today. I just wanted to drop by and introduce myself.”

“Oh,” she said, “you’re the new neighbor, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” he said. Goodness, he was an attractive man when he smiled. “I’m John Sheppard. I just bought the house from Anna Johansen. She told me all about how nice the neighborhood was, and insisted I promise I’d introduce myself around and not be a stranger, she couldn’t bear to think the neighborhood would become strangers.”

“I’m Mrs. Nellie Gunderson,” Mrs. Gunderson said, and shook his hand.

“Mrs. Gunderson,” he said, taking the hint. She hated it when people presumed to use her first name when they barely knew her, especially when they were young, but young people all did nowadays. Not this young man. He was well-bred, that was for certain. “Mrs. Johansen spoke very highly of you. Said you have a son in the service.”

“I do,” she said. “My Joseph is in Afghanistan with the Army.”

John smiled. “I served two tours in Afghanistan with the Air Force,” he said.

“Bless your heart,” she said, astonished. She wouldn’t have taken him for military, with that hair. “And are you out of the service, now?”

“No,” he said, “I’m still in. I’m a Lieutenant Colonel in the Air Force. I’ve been deployed overseas for years, and I just wanted to have somewhere to come home to.”

“It seems you have a lot of friends staying with you,” Mrs. Gunderson said.

“I do,” John said. “I do. A lot of us got rotated back Stateside but some of the guys I served with don’t have anywhere to go. A couple of them are from special operations teams, allied task forces and the like— Ronon, the guy with the dreadlocks who probably scared the bejesus out of you hanging off the edge of my porch roof?”

“He certainly did,” Mrs. Gunderson said, chuckling.

“He scared me too. I told him to hang up lights, not start a circus act.” John laughed and shook his head. “Well, Ronon was a scout for my unit, and he’s a refugee— his entire village was destroyed, he’s the last of his kind. And the woman with us, Teyla, she and her husband Kanaan, they’re refugees too. The kid is their son. His name’s Torren and he’ll be one in February or so.”

“I saw the baby,” she said. “I was wondering if he had a mother.”

“He does,” John said. “Teyla wasn’t helping with the decorating, she’s been helping me clean up inside. Not that Mrs. Johansen didn’t keep her house well, or clean it when she left, but it’s sort of not put together. We’ll be having some guests this week, I invited a lot of people around. So I apologize in advance if we’re a little noisy or anything, I’ll come by and give you my phone number so you can call if we’re bothering you. We just don’t have the phone hooked up yet.”

“Rowdy parties, hm?” Mrs. Gunderson asked.

“We don’t aim to be rowdy,” John said. “But— there’ll be a lot of us, and many comings and goings, and a lot of us aren’t used to, well, civilian life.”

“Once I take my hearing aid out,” Mrs. Gunderson confessed, “there’s not much rowdiness that’ll disturb me. Professor Chang on the other side, though, he still hears pretty well, and he’s on the driveway side of the house, so slamming car doors tend to keep him up. It can’t be as bad as when all of Anna’s children were teenagers, though.”

John laughed, at that. “I’ll talk to him next,” he said. “I gotta run, gotta get back to it, but I just figured I’d drop by. And oh— we’re going to attempt to make Christmas cookies tomorrow, and none of us has any idea how to bake at all, so if the fire truck shows up don’t worry.”

“Oh my goodness,” Mrs. Gunderson said. “Don’t burn the house down.”

“We won’t,” John said. “I already have a plan B. You know they just sell cookies in stores now? I swear they didn’t used to be any good, but there’s a lot more variety in grocery stores than I remember. Or maybe I just have more disposable income now.” He laughed. “I’ve been deployed a long time, I’ve mostly forgotten how this stuff works.”

“I’ve never bought a store-bought Christmas cookie in my life,” Mrs. Gunderson said. “I wouldn’t know if they’re any good. I wouldn’t expect them to be.”

“I’ve been eating in mess halls a long time,” John said. “It doesn’t take a lot to impress me anymore.”

Mrs. Gunderson suddenly thought of her Joseph eating mess hall food, and it stabbed her right under her heart. “Is that so,” she said quietly, sadly, and inwardly she resolved that there would be no store-bought Christmas cookies next door.

“Anyway,” John said, “it was lovely to meet you, Mrs. Gunderson, and I’ll try to be a good neighbor. Mrs. Johansen left some big shoes to fill and I’ve got some more deployments coming up so I won’t be around a lot, but I’ll keep the place up, I promise.”

“See that you do, young man,” Mrs. Gunderson said, and watched him go.

He had a very, very nice ass. Yes, these new neighbors would do nicely.

She closed the door, went into the kitchen, and called Mrs. Andrews across the street. “Have you made your Christmas cookies yet?”

“Not yet,” Mrs. Andrews said. “I was going to do them tomorrow. Did you notice the— of course you noticed the people in old Mrs. Johansen’s house.”

“One of them just stopped by to introduce himself,” Mrs. Gunderson said. “He’s military, just home between deployments. Those people with him are mostly refugees. He said he’s going to try to learn how to bake cookies tomorrow because he never has, and then he said if it didn’t work he was just going to buy some at the store, but it really doesn’t seem right to me that someone who’s just served two tours in Afghanistan should have to have store-bought Christmas cookies.”

“It doesn’t at all,” Mrs. Andrews said. Her granddaughter was a petty officer in the Navy. “We’ll have to do something about that.”

“That’s what I thought,” Mrs. Gunderson said, satisfied.

 

 

Teyla was sitting in the middle of the living room floor when he got back, with one of the brand-new laundry baskets full of warm linens. Torren was crawling around on the floor and she was trying to fold the towels and sheets and things. Most of them were from the linen closets here, the things Anna had left them— not worn out, but not new enough for anyone else to particularly want. But sitting in closets for probably years had left most of them musty-smelling, so they’d put the old washer and dryer to heavy use re-washing everything. And Teyla had almost lost her mind in Target when John had taken her out for a tactical raid. He wasn’t going to let on exactly how much what they’d spent added up to— and it really, really didn’t matter. Even after buying the house, he had plenty left to furnish it.

Besides, her reaction when he’d taken her to the grocery store had been even better.

They’d needed two shopping carts in both places. But it was a home now. The fridge was full of food and beer, there were little electric candles in most of the windows (Kanaan was enchanted with them), the porch was the most decorated bit of real estate John had ever been in charge of, and there were new welcome mats, new floor mats, new dish towels, fucking coordinated hand soap dispensers, you name it, the house had it now. And Christmas decorations to end all Christmas decorations. All they needed yet was a tree.

“I think we have enough now for the double bed in the small bedroom, the double bed in the end bedroom, the queen size bed in the main bedroom, the crib in the main bedroom, and the twin beds in three of the other bedrooms,” Teyla said. “I thought we might save the bunk beds for last, as most of our guests would probably prefer to bunk alone. I think there is a double bed in one of the attic bedrooms but it is not as nice up there.”

“We can worry about that if more people show up,” John said. “I dunno who’ll really come. Lorne said he’d stop by but it’s a day trip for him from his sister’s. I don’t think McKay will come by at all, but if he does he’ll bring Jennifer and who knows what she’ll want.” John moved to sit and help her fold, then paused. “Hey, want a beer?”

“Oh,” Teyla said, “yes, please.”

“Where are the guys?” John asked.

“Putting the crib together,” Teyla said.

John laughed. “Oh god.”

“I know,” she said. “I will give them another half an hour, then I will mount a rescue mission.”

“Beer first,” John said, and went and got two out. He came and sat by her, and began folding towels efficiently.

“How were the neighbors?” Teyla asked.

“On that side, Mrs. Gunderson is a sweet little old lady,” John said. “Pretty sharp, though. She was nice. Her son’s in the Army, in Afghanistan right now.”

“Oh,” Teyla said, “is that not the place where you were?”

“I been there a couple times,” John said.

“Is it nice?” she asked.

“No, not with us there,” he said, and took a swig. “The other side, the guy’s a retired college professor, Dr. Chang. He’s pretty funny. He gave me the inside scoop, there’s a deli a couple blocks down that makes eggnog just for the Christmas season and he says it’s freakin’ amazing, so I’m gonna go get some of that first thing tomorrow. Don’t let me forget. I haven’t had good eggnog in forever.”

“Egg nog,” Teyla said solemnly. “Did they not serve that in the mess hall? As I recall it was quite tasty but very… rich?”

“Yes,” John said. “Incredibly rich. You drink two cups of this stuff, you gotta roll home. And traditionally you load it up with booze. Brandy, I think. I’ll pick some up, tomorrow’s gotta be the day for the liquor store and the hardware store. I probably shouldn’t let Ronon loose in either place, huh?”

Teyla laughed. “I do not know what you find in a hardware store,” she said.

“Tools,” John said. “Lumber. Plumbing supplies. Zip ties. Hammers. Light bulbs. Saws. Floor tiles. Light fixtures. Small appliances. Curtain rods. Screws, nails, wall anchors, picture hanging wire. Stuff like that, all in a place the size of the grocery store we were in today.”

“I cannot grasp the sheer enormousness of the markets on this world,” Teyla said. “And the multiplicity. How does one know where to go to get which things, and how does one remember who has the best prices?”

“Oh,” John said, “I never freakin’ know where to go. But the prices? You look on the Internet. Oh, I should get a dehumidifier for the basement.” He pulled the little notebook out of his cargo pocket and made a note.

Teyla smiled. Torren was curled up in the laundry, asleep, so she left those blankets untouched and dumped out another basket to fold it. This one had a lot of baby clothes in it. John, paranoid, had made her pre-wash everything she’d bought before he’d let her dress Torren in it. God knew what chemicals or allergens there were on Earth that’d be too much for his Pegasus-born, fledgling immune system.

John fished out the four or five pairs of his socks that were in the load, and balled them up, setting them aside, then rescued his underwear. It was sort of weird, mixing his underwear in with other people’s laundry, but sort of not. This was his family, after all.

“Ah, hey,” Ronon said, clattering down the stairs like a wild animal. “Beer?”

“In the fridge, buddy,” John said. Kanaan was right behind him, somehow much quieter. He stopped on his way across the room, to gaze down at Torren. A soft smile lit his face, and John looked away, feeling like it was intruding to watch.

Ronon came back in with not only a beer, but also one of the cardboard takeout containers of leftovers. John no longer had that kind of metabolism, and didn’t really miss it. Kanaan sat composedly on the couch with a beer and sighed. “That crib was very complicated,” he said.

“It was crazy,” Ronon said. “Crazy people built that thing.”

“Can’t have been that bad,” John said. “You both survived.”

“True,” Ronon said, and burped. He frowned at the wall. “We need a TV.”

“I ordered one,” John said. “They’re delivering it tomorrow. Oh, hey. I might not be here. When it comes, you just gotta sign your name where they say. Gonna be probably two guys, probably in a kind of uniform, with a big truck with letters on the side. They’ll say they have a delivery, you say okay and show them where you want them to put it, you sign whatever they give you that says they delivered it, you say thanks and they go on their way. That’s all there is to that.”

“Okay,” Ronon said. “Sounds all right. Where’ll you be?”

“More shopping,” John said.

Ronon looked around. “What else could this house possibly need?”

“Besides a TV?” John said. “New taps for the faucets in both upstairs bathrooms, because the ones here are old and they drip and will probably rust out. New traps for the drains, because these old ones are so clogged and gross and also probably about to rust out. New light fixtures for the front hallway and the back stairs, because those old ones are definitely on their last legs. New lightbulbs everywhere because it looks like Anna couldn’t change them when they burned out so she just didn’t. And a Christmas tree because you need to have a Christmas tree.”

“A tree,” Teyla said. “Wait, is that like the thing they put in the mess hall that one year?”

“Yeah,” John said, “just like that, only theirs sucked. We’re going to do it right.”

“All right then,” she said, in that manner she had when she had decided to just let him do whatever it was he was going to do. He loved her for it. He wasn’t drunk enough to get maudlin and tell them all how much he loved them, but it would probably happen at some point this week. He was mentally preparing for it.

It’d be easier if McKay were here, if he had his whole team, but he wasn’t holding his breath for that one. Jennifer wanted to spend Christmas with her dad, and this was Rodney’s big chance to meet the dad formally and for real, and John really, really wasn’t thinking about it.

“Kanaan,” Teyla said, “Torren is asleep here, so I am just going to leave him while I go upstairs and make the beds with these clean sheets.”

“I’ll help,” John said. It was always easier making beds with two people. He grabbed his beer and took an armload of sheets and pillowcases, and followed Teyla up the stairs. “I like those jeans,” he said without thinking.

Teyla turned and arched an eyebrow. “My jeans?” she asked.

“Er,” he said, “yeah.” He paused. “I guess that sounded kinda bad. I wasn’t, like, checkin’ out your ass, I just mean they suit you.”

“Thank you,” she said. “Sergeant Banks helped me pick them out. There were such a bewildering array of choices. I am still not used to ready-made clothing such as is so common on your world.”

“Yeah,” John said, “it is weird, now I think about it.” He shrugged. “Still, that’s a good cut for you.”

Teyla smiled, and swigged from her beer before ducking into the corner bedroom and sorting through the piled sheets in her arms. “These purple ones were double, I think,” she said, pulling them out. John found the purple pillowcases in his armload, and put them on the bed. “The other double set is this blue floral. There are no matching pillowcases for it, though, so I washed two of these yellow ones that don’t match any of the other sheets.”

“Sounds good,” John said, and put the pillowcases onto the pillows. Teyla helped him make the bed. “We’ll stick Ronon in here, right?” It had the best views of the street from the window, which Ronon liked.

They went through and made the other beds, including the crib. “I suppose it is a rather complex piece of furniture,” Teyla said, leaning on the crib railing.

John had bought a whole crazy matching crib set because why not. There were bumpers and everything, all color-coordinated, and the salesperson had informed him that old cribs weren’t safe and if he loved his baby he’d buy a new one. John had listened politely, then not bought a crib, because honestly, if Anna had put fifteen babies or however many she’d had in this thing and none of them had been killed by it, it couldn’t be that bad. (She’d kept it for grandchild visits. None of them had died either.)

“Yeah,” John said, “good thing our manly types figured it out.” Pegasus masculinity wasn’t nearly so fragile and prickly a thing as Western-Earth-culture masculinity (American masculinity?), but it had its moments. John was warming up to Kanaan, though; the guy barely spoke but when he did, boy, it was usually a zinger. Guy wielded sarcasm like a finely-honed blade. And normally, John wasn’t its target. Which John appreciated. He was kind of delicate lately.

His nightmares were back, as bad as they’d ever been. He’d thought about taking a bedroom far from the others so he wouldn’t wake them up, but it was probably a better idea just to take sleeping pills. He didn’t like them, didn’t like the sleep he got when he took them, didn’t like how sometimes he woke up panicking because he couldn’t move. But they were better than making an ass of himself screaming down the hallway at four in the morning. Even if he slept at the opposite end of the house there was no way Ronon wasn’t going to wake up once John started screaming.

Maybe it wouldn’t happen here, though. Maybe it was just Atlantis.

He shouldn’t have had the beer if he was gonna have the pill, though. Damn it.

He helped Teyla make the queen sized bed in here. She’d protested being given the master bedroom once the term had been explained to her, but John had insisted— she and Kanaan and Torren would fit best in here, and the ensuite bathroom would be good for changing Torren’s diapers. John really didn’t care where he slept— he wasn’t going to admit about the sleeping pills, but the room down the hall was fine for him, had an eastern view so he could see the sunrise, which he liked— kind of even had a balcony, if you used the back porch roof for it. He’d have to put a deck out there, that’d be cool.

Not that he’d be spending that much time here, but still.

He surreptitiously poured his beer out in the bathroom down the hall while he re-measured the sink faucets to make sure he knew what kind to get. Then he went and finished making the beds with Teyla.

Downstairs, they shot the shit for a little while, and John did a refresher course in the basic rules of Earth interactions again, what was rude here and what wasn’t. It was much, much harder to do this for Earth than anywhere else, not just because John was so immersed in it it was hard for him to remember what was weird about it, but also because everywhere else they’d been knew about the Stargates and so any really odd behavior was pretty easy to explain. Here, just saying “they’re not from around here” wasn’t really going to cut it beyond a certain level.

Getting Ronon into non-leather pants was going to be kind of important, though. A project for another day. John eyed the clock. Ten. Sort of stupidly early, but if he was going to take the sleeping pill, eight hours plus a little time to get over the grogginess plus time for a jog meant he had to hit the hay kinda soon. So he excused himself, deposited the empty beer bottle in the sink, and went upstairs.

He stood in front of the bathroom mirror for a couple of minutes. The guy in the glass there looked really old, and really tired. There was a lot of gray now at his temples, and it was starting to creep up into the rest of his hair. He could dye it, but who would he be fooling?

Nobody, with the wrinkles around his eyes.

He swallowed the pill, and a whole glass of water like he tried to always do with pills, and went and lay down to wait for the stupid pill to take effect.

At least the clean sheets were pleasant and smelled good. It didn’t smell anything like Atlantis. There was no smell of ocean, no sound of waves. It wouldn’t matter.

He stuck his hand idly down his pants, but the only remotely interesting thing he could think of along those lines was Rodney, and that just made him depressed. He hadn’t slept with the guy in over a year, hadn’t slept with anybody, hadn’t wanted to, and it was kind of sad and pathetic and not particularly helpful.

Fortunately, right about then the pills started dissolving, so he took his hand out of his pants and rolled over and conked out like he’d been hit with a rock.


	3. Let The Jolly Wassailers In

 

It wasn’t that he didn’t have nightmares, it’s that they couldn’t fight through the chemicals to drag him to the surface. He woke out of a dark sucking fog and sat up with his heart hammering. “What,” he said out loud.

Ronon was sitting in the chair by the bed, elbow on the nightstand, chin in his hand. “You never used to sleep like this,” he said mildly, unperturbed by John’s violent awakening.

John peeled himself off the wall, which he’d plastered himself to in pure startled reflex. “Jesus Christ,” he said, and rubbed his face. “What fucking time is it?”

“It’s almost six,” Ronon said. “Figured I’d see if you wanted to go running. You didn’t hear me, like, at all. I coulda come in here and taken everything out of the room and then dangled you by the feet and I don’t think you woulda woken up.”

“Sleeping pills,” John said. “I’m on sleeping pills.” He was too groggy to come up with a lie. “That’s the point of sleeping pills. You don’t wake up for anything.”

“What if we got attacked, though?” Ronon asked, frowning.

“’S why I don’t take ‘em on missions,” John said, rubbing his eyes.

“You never used to take them, before,” Ronon said.

“Not much, no,” John said. “Yeah, I’ll go for a run. Gimme like twenty minutes to get dressed and remember where my feet are.”

“Why are you taking them?” Ronon asked.

“Why does it matter?” John’s eyes were nearly pointing the same direction. Ronon frowned.

“It seems weird,” he said. “It doesn’t seem… like a thing you’d do.”

“Desperate times call for desperate measures,” John said. “I mean it, I’ll meet you down in the kitchen in twenty minutes.”

Ronon stared at him for a long moment, then stood up. “Okay.”

 

After a good long run John’s body felt like his own again. He got in the shower and cranked the heat up and let the endorphins run through him. His dick woke up, and he jerked off without feeling too sad and pathetic about the fact that he was thinking about Rodney’s mouth when he came. Oh well. The orgasm was nice enough, it’d been kind of a while since he’d had one of those. It was kind of nice, too, how it chased away the last clinging bits of the nightmares he hadn’t been awake enough to actually have.

Then it was a whirlwind of action. To the hardware store, home with sink parts and a tree, teaching Ronon basic plumbing to fix the bathroom sinks, another trip to the hardware store when they broke something else, then a side trip to that deli for some eggnog and wow they also had real bagels, like New York style bagels, crispy on the outside and chewy on the inside and John ate one standing right there because it was so goddamn good. The woman behind the counter, an older Asian lady, laughed without mockery at him and insisted on giving him the cream cheese for free for the bagels he took home.

Kanaan was enchanted by the bagels, and by John’s fumbling explanation that they were a regional food from a different area and hard to get here. “Earth has so many tribes,” he said.

“There are a lot of people on this planet,” Ronon agreed.

“Thousands of years without a Stargate,” John said. “Means that we really spread out here and developed our own ways of doin’ things.” He looked around at the three Pegasans. “Not that that’s better or whatever, it’s just different.”

Teyla gave him a sweet, understanding smile, and went back to the toaster to make herself a bagel. She couldn’t cook at all, with Pegasus technology, but things like toaster ovens and microwaves, she was fairly proficient at operating, and it pleased her to have mastered this level of skill when cooking in the manner of her people still eluded her. She was also really good at making coffee, somehow, which John hadn’t thought was the kind of thing that required skill, but somehow when she made it from the same stuff he did, with the same measuring scoop even, hers was better.

This pleased her enormously, and John didn’t at all mind conceding defeat when it was Teyla.

They finished the bathroom sinks, put up the tree, and the TV delivery guys arrived while he was still covered in gunk from the plumbing work. Then they had to take a break to make sure the TV worked, which it did. Teyla discovered that Torren was entranced by cartoons. So was Ronon, so they left the two of them there. John took Teyla to the liquor store and there was an awkward moment when she didn’t have a driver’s license. But fortunately John had insisted on military ID cards for all the Pegasans, so that saved the day. (Figuring out their dates of birth in Earth reckoning had been pretty entertaining. Teyla was only about a year younger than John, it turned out, rather to his surprise.)

By the time they got back it was after noon, so John put brandy in the eggnog and made everyone grilled cheese sandwiches for lunch. When the doorbell rang, he answered it with a spatula in his hand and a dishtowel stuck through his belt.

It was SG-1. Or, at least Vala, Teal’c, and Cam. “Hey,” John said. He’d put the word out all through the channels at the SGC that anybody who wanted to, especially anybody without anywhere else to go, was welcome to come hang out. He’d even made a point of sending the invite to Carter. She was a good egg. But he hadn’t figured SG-1 would bother— even their aliens seemed to have plenty of friends on Earth. Though he felt like Vala was underappreciated.

“Don’t you look pleasantly domestic,” Vala purred, slinking in the door and rubbing the entire front of her body against his as she passed. She was dressed in almost normal Earth clothes, though her coat was a little theatrical.

“I was makin’ grilled cheese sandwiches,” John said, favoring her with an easy grin. “You want one?”

“Grilled… cheese,” Vala said, running her hands down his chest. She’d discovered rather early on in their acquaintance that if John was in the right mood, he’d flirt right back to the point of near-scandal. It drove Jackson nuts, which it pleased Vala enormously to do. “I don’t think I’m familiar with the concept.”

“It’s super good,” John said. Jackson wasn’t here, there was no point putting on a show, but it might be fun anyway. “There’s eggnog too, with brandy. C’mon in!”

“We thank you,” Teal’c said.

“Nice digs,” Cam said. “And hey, if you’re makin’ sandwiches, I’ll totally take one.”

“All right,” John said. “C’mon, we’re all in the kitchen. There’s room, the lady I bought this house from had like twenty kids.”

“Awesome,” Cam said.

“Hey,” John said to Cam, “do you know anything about baking?”

“Baking,” Cam said blankly.

“Yeah,” John said. “Have you ever baked cookies or anything?”

“I’m probably the last person you should ask that,” Cam said.

“You’re the only one here who’d’ve used Earth equipment to do it,” John pointed out.

“Oh,” Cam said, looking around. “Yeah. Well, um. I’ve uh. I’ve made macaroons, like, twice. But I don’t think I could really do you much good in general.”

“Damn it,” John said. He looked at Vala. She held up her hands.

“I’m no cook,” she said.

Teal’c cocked his head. “I am not familiar with the process of baking,” he said, “though I have the necessary skills to cook meals after the fashion of my people.”

Once in the kitchen, they all set to cheerful conversation, and John went back over to the frying pan while Kanaan poured everyone drinks. After a moment, Vala came to lean in the doorway next to the oven, watching him. She was just wearing jeans and a tank top, but they both fitted her very well, and John gave her a nod of admiration. “The clothing of my people suits you,” he said. The sandwich was done, so he flipped it onto a plate where two sandwiches already waited.

She smiled, at that. Her looks were her armor, and she knew John understood that, knew he’d done the same. He’d sometimes wished he had her in the Pegasus Galaxy; sometimes its culture called for ruthless artifice and he just didn’t have anyone to pull it off. He handed the plate with sandwiches to Kanaan, who took it over to the table.

“This house is really yours,” she said quietly. It was a question.

“Yeah,” John said. “It’s all paid for.” He assembled another pair of sandwiches and put them into the frying pan.

“And everything in it,” she said.

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, it’s really mine.”

“You didn’t have to steal anything to get it.” Her shoulders were a little hunched.

“No,” John said. “I— my mom died when I was a kid, and I didn’t know, but she’d left me money. Not a lot of it, but enough for this. I didn’t find out until after my dad died too. He didn’t leave me anything, but he also couldn’t take away what she’d left. He would’ve, if he could, but he couldn’t. My brother told me about it.”

“I didn’t know you had family,” Vala said, almost wistful.

“I didn’t think of them as my family,” John said. “Not after my mother died. The rest of ‘em didn’t really care for me.”

Vala nodded. “It’s hard, to lose a mother,” she said. “A mother is your surest protector. If you’re lucky.”

“Dad beat the shit outta me once she was gone,” John said, with a grim half-smile.

“My father sold me into prostitution after my mother died,” Vala said, her smile similarly brittle.

John picked up his cup and held it out wordlessly, and she caught on and clinked her glass against his in wordless solidarity. “I’ll give you a door key,” John said. “Whenever you want, you can stay here too.”

She stared at him, blank with shock. “Really?”

“Yeah,” John said, and put his glass down to flip the sandwiches over. “I figured on that for Ronon and Teyla and her family, already. It’s a big place. There’s room for whoever needs it. Especially the way Earth keeps the Stargate locked down. I don’t figure the SGC thinks of stuff like this.”

“You hardly know me,” Vala said.

“I know enough,” John said, scraping the old cast iron a bit, absently reclaiming crumbs from the melted and browned butter at the edges of the skillet. “And I know the SGC. I know how this works. You gotta look out for yourself and yours.”

“How did I wind up as part of _yours_?” Vala asked, resting a hip against the edge of the stove. “I haven’t even slept with you.”

John huffed a quiet laugh. “Not how it works,” he said. “Nobody in this house has.” He shrugged. “These are my family. You’ve helped us, I figure you’re family too, or close enough.”

Vala stared at him, blue eyes blank, a faint line between her black eyebrows. She was probably trying to figure out what he expected to get in return. John knew what it was like to do that kind of calculation all the time. He shrugged, and looked back down at the sandwiches. “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “All I ask in return is that you don’t hurt any of the rest of the family. At least, not on purpose.” He flipped a sandwich onto a plate. “Go on, sit, eat.”

She took the plate with the sandwich, smiled at him a little blankly, and went to sit down. John made sandwiches until there were two left for him and everyone else seemed to be done, then turned off the burner, sloshed water from the teakettle into the frying pan so it hissed a little, and took his sandwiches and sat down. Most of the assembled at the table had moved on to beers, and Teal’c was solemnly explaining something about Earth culture to Kanaan.

Vala was sitting practically in Cam’s lap, which she was wont to do mostly because Cam had no idea how to deal with it— he was a smart enough guy to have categorized Vala in about the same spot most people would put a venomous snake, and John had a moment to wonder how many times she’d bit him for this to take effect. Cam was smarter than he looked, so probably not many. Vala was also smart enough to take Cam’s reaction as a compliment. John liked their dynamic. He didn’t really like Jackson’s dynamic with Vala, though— he thought Vala actually cared too much for Jackson, who knew it and treated her like shit because of it. Jackson was an all right guy, but not all right enough that it made up for the way he treated Vala.

John wasn’t sure when Vala had slipped from _entertaining acquaintance_ to _family_ in his mind, but she had, and that was that, he didn’t really question those things once they were in place. He didn’t trust her entirely, couldn’t— she wouldn’t have wanted him to, she didn’t even trust herself entirely— but he knew where the line was, and that was enough. He’d give her the keys to the house and the location of the petty cash stash, but not the unfettered access to the checkbook he’d give Teyla and Ronon. That was safe enough.

“This house is awesome,” Cam said. Ronon had given him a tour, it turned out, while John had been cooking. “There’s like, twenty bedrooms!”

“Could be,” John said. “The whole third floor’s barely finished, I figure there should be a bathroom up there and maybe make half of it into a sitting room and the other half into a couple more little bedrooms. I dunno. The house was cheap, the neighborhood’s nice, there’s room for a puddlejumper in the backyard between the fruit trees if you cloak it and have a good pilot. That’s all I really wanted.”

“Is there a jumper there now?” Cam asked, lighting up a little.

John smirked. “‘Course,” he said. He shook a finger. “No joyriding today. Maybe later. I’m bein’ good, filin’ flight plans and all. I don’t want anybody to get it in their heads that I shouldn’t be allowed to just have a puddlejumper wherever I want to. It’s officially out here for maintenance and testing.”

“Maybe later,” Cam said speculatively, turning his beer around in his hands. He couldn’t fly them, he didn’t have the gene, but he was a pilot and he appreciated a good ride. He was all right in John’s book too, all told.

The doorbell rang, and John frowned. “You expectin’ anybody?” he asked the SG-1 members.

Cam shook his head. “Don’t think so,” he said. “Well, Sam was gonna try to come by, but I didn’t think she’d be in until dinnertime, if she came at all.”

John pulled the dish towel out of his belt and stood up. “Guess I’ll go see who it is,” he said. A tiny renegade thought prickled at him— McKay?— but he pushed it away. Rodney was in Chippewa Falls for the duration, and that wasn’t likely to change. And if it did, it’d be because of something bad, so it wouldn’t do to hope for it.

He could see a floral skirt through the sidelight window at the door, so he wasn’t totally shocked when he opened the door and it was Mrs. Gunderson from next door. “Hey, Mrs. Gunderson,” he said, grinning brightly at her. She was accompanied by another woman, much younger, and white, probably around John’s own age, dark-haired and sensibly attired. They were carrying big canvas grocery sacks. “C’mon in, c’mon in, I got some of that eggnog from Yee’s, Dr. Chang told me about it, it’s great! Do you want some?”

“John Sheppard,” Mrs. Gunderson said, smiling, “this is Jessie Peterson from down the street.” John held the door and the two women came in, and he shook Jessie Peterson’s hand.

“I live in the yellow house with the blue pots out front,” Jessie said. “Nice to meet you.”

“Oh, I saw that one,” John said, nodding. “Hey, so good of you to stop by.”

“I notice the fire trucks haven’t been by yet,” Mrs. Gunderson said.

“That’s because I haven’t tried baking yet,” John said. “More friends have stopped by, but would you know, none of them know how to bake either?”

“They don’t cover it in pilot school,” Cam said. He’d come out of the kitchen and was standing in the hallway, within John’s view but out of the line of sight of the door— backup, John thought, then laughed at himself for thinking tactically. But he saw Cam’s face, and knew that was precisely what Cam had been doing, and they looked at one another and spared a moment to be grateful it was just neighborhood ladies, for once.

“Cam, this is my new next-door neighbor, Mrs. Nellie Gunderson,” John said, “and Jessie Peterson from down the street, the yellow house. This is Lt. Col. Cameron Mitchell, Air Force, he’s a colleague of mine.”

“Pleased to meet you,” Cam said politely, shaking each woman’s hand in turn.

“John mentioned last night that he was probably going to have store-bought cookies for Christmas, since he didn’t know how to bake,” Mrs. Gunderson said. “And it made me think of my son Joseph in Afghanistan eating mess hall food for Christmas, and I thought, we can’t have this. So I made some calls. We normally have a Christmas cookie exchange in the neighborhood anyway, and we include some of the folks who can’t make their own in it, and I thought, we should probably send some over as a housewarming gift. So Jessie’s young legs have been doing most of the heavy work, and Mrs. Andrews across the street did most of the organizing, and here are some Christmas cookies so you don’t have to buy them at the store.”

Vala was in the doorway, looking considerably warier than either of them, but Teyla was beside her and was smiling warmly at whatever the expression on John’s face was. “What are Christmas cookies?” Vala asked quietly.

“I do not know,” Teyla answered, “but by John’s expression, they are something good.”

“Come in,” John said, “come into the kitchen, have some eggnog, sit down a minute. Jeez— wow, Mrs. Gunderson, that’s— I don’t—“

They got Mrs. Gunderson installed at the head of the kitchen table, Jessie next to her, and Cam went around and made all the introductions. Meanwhile Jessie unpacked the bags and stacked cookie tins and Tupperware containers on the kitchen table, and the aliens all stared at them in curiosity. John was feeling strangely liquid inside, like he didn’t know how to breathe or make words. These people didn’t even know him, didn’t know his team, didn’t know what they’d done for a planet that wasn’t even theirs.

Both women accepted brandy in their eggnog, and seemed charmed by the questions as they had to explain what Christmas cookies were. “But they seem like so much work,” Vala said, peering at an intricately decorated sugar cookie. “And then you just— eat them?”

“Yeah,” Cam said. “It’s tradition.”

Ronon was strangely silent. John sat next to him and bumped shoulders with him. “What?” he asked.

“We had these,” Ronon said. “Or— just like ‘em.” He waved a hand jerkily. “The household would come together and make ‘em, as many different kinds as you could— the tradition was to make six different kinds. For the year-end.”

“That’s a Scandinavian tradition,” Mrs. Gunderson said. Of course— Gunderson was a Norwegian name, even though she didn’t look particularly Scandinavian. “A woman proves her mastery of the household arts by making at least seven kinds of Christmas cookies. Because it’s easy to just make a hundred of the same cookie, but much more difficult to make a dozen each of seven different kinds.”

“Of course,” Teyla said.

“The shortcut around here is that we all just make one or two different kinds, and then make extra and swap them around,” Jessie said, smiling. She had pink cheeks now, from the brandy, and had warmed up immediately to all of them. “So we all have a dozen different kinds of cookies to choose from. And we all get fat at the holidays. You should see us at Easter, we do the same with decorated eggs.”

“Oh stars,” Vala said, looking shocked. She had a cookie crumbled in her hands. “These are delicious!”

“Of course they are,” Mrs. Gunderson said. “Those are Maggie Andrews’s tea cookies.”

“The really fancy spun-sugar ones are from the gay couple at the T-intersection, Mark and Jerry,” Jessie said. “Mark is an architect and Jerry’s actually a pastry chef, so they do some crazy baking sometimes.”

“The purple house,” Mrs. Gunderson filled in, gesturing to where the street did indeed end in a T-intersection. “With the bay window. They have a corgi, you’ll see them walking it— usually Mark, in the mornings, and Jerry, in the evenings.”

Torren had smeared powdered sugar all over himself and his father, and was cooing happily and making a mess. Kanaan eventually handed him out to John, who took him over to the sink and cleaned his hands and face with a minimum of screaming, then tucked him into his shoulder and let him watch all the people. Torren liked people; an infancy on Atlantis had prepared him well for being the center of attention of a lot of adults who didn’t see kids a ton and reacted disproportionately. He liked the attention, liked the faces people made, and was a shameless flirt.

He also really liked John, which was good, since John liked him. Babies were easier than adults; you couldn’t touch adults without it meaning something, but little children were usually pretty open books, and if they touched you it was just because it was comforting.

The doorbell rang again, and John said to Torren, “Let’s go see who that is.” More neighbors? He noticed Vala taking up backup position in the kitchen doorway, watching him calmly, hands out of sight. She probably had a weapon. It felt weird to him not to have his.

He opened the door. It was Samantha Carter. “Hey,” he said. “Cam said he didn’t figure you’d be in until tonight.”

“Timetable got moved up,” she said cheerfully, and paused to look at Torren. “Oh my gosh. Is this Torren?”

“Yes,” John said. “Isn’t he giant?”

“Sam,” Vala said. “You’re just in time for the oddest ritual. This old woman came with blessings of food from the neighborhood, in the form of these really intricate little pastries. Is this normal?”

“Little pastries,” Sam said blankly, tearing her eyes away from Torren, who had begun flirting by peek-a-booing with her in the manner that had twisted many a proud military heart around his tiny chubby fingers. “Blessings of little pastries. What?”

“Christmas cookies,” John said, and found his chest unexpectedly tight. “The neighbor— I told her I didn’t know how to bake cookies and she took up a collection of the neighborhood’s Christmas cookies.”

“Oh my gosh,” Sam said, “that’s so sweet.”

“No,” John said, answering Vala’s earlier question, “it’s not normal, it’s really unusually kind.”

Vala was beside him as he followed Sam into the kitchen. “You’re really touched by this,” she observed.

“I am,” John said, struggling to achieve a more normal expression. “Nobody’s— I’ve never had anything like this.”

“I have got to find out more about these cookies,” Vala said, and disappeared into the kitchen. Sam was introducing herself to Mrs. Gunderson and Jessie, and Kanaan had poured her some eggnog already.

“I have got to change your diaper,” John said to Torren, wrinkling his nose.

He went to the bathroom and took care of Torren’s impressively stinky diaper, thinking for a moment that Kanaan had timed the handoff rather fortuitously to achieve this result. Oh well. He’d dealt with worse things. Torren cooed and flailed, and John managed to wrestle him back into a clean diaper, back into his clothes, and washed his hands well before wandering back out.

Mrs. Gunderson and Jessie were leaving, and John went and thanked them again, his tongue numb and heavy and clumsy. He must have gotten his point across, though, because both women smiled sweetly at him, looking touched— it was either that or they just thought he looked really cute with Torren, he kind of got that a lot, especially when Torren flirted. If he were looking for a girlfriend, Torren would get him one.

Too bad he really wasn’t. Didn’t make sense anyway, since he was hopefully leaving the galaxy soon, as soon as they cleared Atlantis to go back to Pegasus. Which every day seemed farther and farther away. But it would happen someday.

Cam raided their newly-stocked liquor cabinet and made everyone Manhattans, which were apparently the sort of old man drink that guys from wherever the hell Cam was from drank at Christmastime. They seemed to be mostly whiskey, which was fine for 1pm on a holiday. John and Ronon took their incredibly strong cocktails and found a rickety ladder in the shed and started working on replacing light fixtures. As John had secretly half-hoped, it took about five minutes for Carter to show up and say, “What the hell are you doing?”

“Wiring,” Ronon grunted.

“The black wire is the hot one,” Sam said. “The white is neutral. And green is for grounding.”

“Why is black hot?” Ronon asked.

“It just is,” she said. “It’s a convention. Sheppard, why are you making the alien do this?”

“He can reach better,” John said. “And, um, I forgot Earth wiring’s different than the stuff on Atlantis.”

“It’s totally different,” Ronon said. “But it’s easy. There’s like no way I can screw this up.”

“Yes,” Sam said, “there is. If I reconnected the circuit breaker it’d blow right away. Come down from there, Ronon.”

She went up the ladder instead and John stood there handing her tools and thinking smugly that it couldn’t have gone better if he’d planned it. Three hours later, John had had three Manhattans and so had Sam, Cam and Teal’c had been unleashed on the hardware store and come back with an incredible assortment of parts, and most of the wiring on the first floor of his house had been re-done to conform to the latest codes and improve efficiency. All of his lighting fixtures now took high-efficiency bulbs, most were on dimmer switches with the top mode being operating-theater-bright, all of the outlets were grounded, the kitchen and bathroom had ground-fault interrupt switches, and the sink now boasted a garbage disposal. The entire circuit box was brand new and there were circuits installed and ready to be run up to the third floor, which prior to this had only had a single outlet and lightswitch on the same circuit daisy-chained up from the second floor.

Sam sat a little unsteadily on the hall steps. “It’s been a really long time since I worked with Earth wiring,” she said happily.

“That was kind of awesome,” John said. He rubbed at his forehead. “Shit, I’m hammered.”

Sam laughed. “Me too,” she said. “I hadn’t planned on drinking that much but hell, it’s Christmas.”

“One more wiring diagram,” Cam said, standing in the doorway from the living room.

“What’d we miss?” Sam asked.

“The tree,” he said. “We gotta decorate it.”

“Oh yeah,” John said, and jumped up. “We gotta decorate it!”

“I’m getting started on dinner,” Kanaan said quietly, catching John by the arm. “I just wanted to confirm with you what these foods are, since I am unfamiliar with most of them.”

“Oh yeah,” John said. “Hang on.” He pulled out the decorations and put Sam in charge, then went in to the kitchen and interpreted the recipe book with Kanaan as his assistant. He could cook, sort of; it was different from baking, less fussy, and easier to do as you went along. Baked ham and scalloped potatoes and mushrooms florentine and a green salad with a balsamic and crumbly bleu dressing. Vala came in and watched them for a while, mixed everyone another round of drinks (something she’d improvised herself based loosely upon a drink popular in the wider Milky Way somewhere, with an obscene name; it seemed to consist largely of vodka, but went down very pleasantly), then came back and stood next to John.

“Let me help cut things, I’m good at that,” she said, and he gave her a knife and made a crack about trusting her with a weapon, and she joked back and the rest of the dinner prep went by in a bright, happy blur.

Cam set the dining room table as formally as it was possible to do with the mismatched dishes and hodgepodge of silverware Anna had left behind. They even found candles in one of the sideboard drawers, and some battered candlesticks. John was quite drunk by the time dinner was served, but so was everyone else. Dinner was actually good, due to Kanaan’s nose being better than the oven timer. The scalloped potatoes were slightly underdone and the ham a tiny bit dry, but nobody was in any condition to complain, especially once John opened the wine.


	4. Blue Christmas

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> More visitors!
> 
> Sam's expression changed slowly— she was definitely as drunk as John was— and she turned slowly to look at John. “Oh holy Hannah,” she said, “you’re the same Sheppards.”

The doorbell rang again just as they were starting to clear the table and Sam was explaining how leftovers worked to the aliens whose experience with Earth food had been almost exclusively in mess hall settings.

“Oh,” John said belatedly, realizing what the noise was. “Right.” He collected Torren from the floor, and noted that Vala took his six as he went to the door. A peek through the sidelight told him only that it was a man in a dark coat. He opened the door a little more dramatically than he’d meant to, clumsy with drink as he was.

“Hi, John,” the man at the door said, and John stared blankly at him for a long moment. Long enough that in his peripheral vision, Vala moved up, graceful and dangerous as a cat, a hand concealed against her side, low by her thigh— a weapon, drawn, ready, that John couldn’t see, and neither could their visitor.

“Dave,” John said finally. “Hey! Dave! C’mon in! We just had dinner but there’s tons left over.”

“Oh, I ate,” Dave said. “But thank you.”

“Vala, this is my brother, Dave,” John said. “Dave, this is Vala Mal Doran. She’s a coworker.”

“Another civilian contractor?” Dave asked.

“Yes,” Vala said smoothly, “I work for the Air Force.”

“This little guy is Torren,” John said, “he’s Teyla’s son, she’s my coworker too.” He peered down at Torren’s face. Torren played shy, burying his face in John’s shoulder, and John laughed and kissed his head. “C’mon, everyone’s probably in the kitchen.” Vala gave John a curious look, then smiled at Dave again.

“I would have called ahead,” Dave said, “but your postcard didn’t give a phone number, and I didn’t think directory services would have you listed yet.”

“Right,” John said, “no. I, ah— I didn’t think you’d come.”

“I can’t stay long,” Dave said. “But I had to stop by.”

“I bet you have family Christmas plans,” John said, and it uncurled warmly through his midsection that for the first time in at least a decade, so did he.

“I do,” Dave said. “I had actually thought to invite you, but it seems you have made that unnecessary.” He paused in the kitchen door for a moment, visibly taken aback.

John edged past him with Torren. “Hey, everybody,” he said to the milling crowd of people. “This is my brother Dave. Dave, this is everybody.”

“Everybody in the whole world?” Dave asked, raising an eyebrow. “Or just everybody who matters?”

It probably wasn’t meant as a sly dig— couldn’t have been, because Dave didn’t know who was missing who mattered to John— but John slumped a little. “No,” he said, “not that, I just mean it’s everybody who’s here.” He gathered himself, and gestured. “Colonel Sam Carter, Lt. Colonel Cameron Mitchell, Kanaan— he’s Torren’s dad— Teal’c of Chulak, Ronon Dex— you met him at Dad’s funeral— Teyla Emmagan— that’s Torren’s mom— Sam Carter— did I miss anybody?”

“You got me twice,” Sam said, laughing, and came forward to shake Dave’s hand. “Dave Sheppard? Why have we met before?”

“Oh,” Dave said, “yes, Samantha Carter, yes. Um, I think it was something to do with government bids.”

“Right,” Sam said, and snapped her fingers. “Sheppard Power Logistics bid on some power generation requirements and you were there. You know, we got some really good use out of those generator components, it’s a shame the specifics are so… classi…fied.” Her expression changed slowly— she was definitely as drunk as John was— and she turned slowly to look at John. “Oh holy Hannah,” she said, “you’re the same Sheppards.”

John threw his head back and laughed, to Torren’s great pleasure— Torren reached into his mouth and squealed in delight. “Oh my god,” he said, retrieving his tongue from the child, “how long have we been coworkers?”

“I had no idea!” Sam said, open-mouthed, looking from one Sheppard to the other. “I had no idea! I never made the connection! How did I not make the connection?”

“It’s not that uncommon a name,” Dave said kindly.

“I just spent the entire afternoon redoing the wiring of the house of the son of a utilities mogul,” Sam said, fixing John with an accusing stare.

“How should I know household wiring?” John protested. “You only stepped in because we’d’ve burned the place down otherwise. All I was trying to do was replace a lighting fixture.”

“You should try one of these drinks,” Vala said to Dave, putting a glass in his hand. “And don’t let these arseholes berate you.”

“I probably deserve it,” Dave said, but grinned at her. “Thank you.”

“Cheers,” John said, and clinked his mostly-empty wineglass against Dave’s full highball glass. “Oh, be careful, Vala’s been mixing these things all afternoon that don’t taste all that strong but… What did you call them again?”

Dave took a sip, and Vala waited until he lowered the glass. “The bartender who taught them to me referred to them as face-fuckers,” she said, “but I don’t usually tell people the name, because it’s much better for it to be a surprise.”

Dave’s expression was priceless to the extent that John laughed until he fell over and had to be helped back up by both Sam and Vala. “Oh god,” he said, “oh, oh God, Vala, don’t _do_ that.”

“Well,” Vala said, “it’s not the drink that fucks your face, it’s just that you’re so drunk that you’ll kind of let anybody—“

“Vala!” Cam said. “Oh my God, it’s not the story about the bartender on P9X-428 again, is it?”

Sam cleared her throat loudly. “We’d probably better adjourn to the living room,” she said.

“Well,” Vala said, “he didn’t fuck _my_ face.”

John raised both eyebrows and slowly turned his head to look at Cam, who blinked back in incomprehension for a moment before he began to sputter.

“It wasn’t _my_ face either!” Cam yelled.

“Spoken by the man who has lost his pants in more exotic locations than I can even name,” Sam put in, more or less manhandling John and Torren into the living room. Teyla rescued her son and greeted Dave formally while Cam sputtered indignantly about whose face had been fucked or not.

“Your brother has been a good friend and colleague to me for many years,” she said, managing to look dignified even as Torren tried to put his fingers in her nose. “He is one of the best people I know, on any w— in any nation.”

“So I’ve heard,” Dave said.

“Hey,” Ronon said, “good seein’ you again.” He clapped Dave on the arm so hard he staggered sideways.

“Yeah,” Dave said, recovering admirably, “and in happier circumstances.”

“Oh,” Ronon said, “circumstances’ll get pretty damn happy if you keep drinkin’ those. I’ve had five, I don’t even know where my feet are.” He went into the living room and dug out the remote, and in a moment Ronon, Kanaan, and Teal’c were all seated on the couch staring in fascination at Cartoon Network.

“We just got the TV today,” John said, gesturing as Teyla went in and sat down with Torren. “Did you want anything to eat, or were you good?”

“I’m good,” Dave said. “Really.” He followed John back into the kitchen. “All of these people are your coworkers?” he asked.

“Mostly,” John said. “Sort of. Carter used to be my commanding officer before she rotated out. Teal’c and Cam and Vala are her team. Teyla and Ronon are my team. They’re… I mean, I sort of told you before, my team’s kind of… family. And Carter and them… they’re kind of extended family. They’re the ones who’ve hauled my ass out of the fire, and I’ve put my ass on the line for them, and it’s kind of… it’s not blood like from sharing a womb, no, but it’s blood that we’ve shed.”

“The cartoonist Bill Mauldin referred to it as the Brotherhood of Them What Has Been Shot At,” Dave said.

John snorted. “There’s that, too,” he said. “There’s a particular brand of intense shit that only a few people have been through, or even know about, is the thing, and these are most of those people.”

“Special ops stuff?” Dave said.

“Yeah,” John said. “Pretty much.” He gestured feebly, emptied his wine glass, went and set it by the sink. There were a fuckload of dirty dishes in here. He had a dishwasher, he thought maybe, but he wasn’t sure if it worked. He’d worry about that when he was sober. He got himself a glass of water, though, in the meantime, because he wasn’t twenty-five anymore and this much booze was going to catch up with him sooner rather than later.

“I talked to the financial guy,” Dave said. “Sounds like you did really well on this house. I’d sort of expected it to be a heap for the price you paid in this neighborhood, but it’s actually really nice.”

“It’s a fantastic neighborhood,” John said. “The seller was holding out for somebody who wouldn’t subdivide it or tear it down, so the price had been reduced a couple times. She was in her eighties and had a bajillion kids, she didn’t need the money so much as she needed to get out of it and into someplace she wouldn’t fall down the stairs.”

“I was sort of wondering why you bought such an enormous house, though. I mean, the square footage— three bathrooms, six bedrooms? Huge yard? It seemed very strange,” Dave said.

“Most of those people have nowhere else to go when we’re not deployed,” John said, gesturing toward the living room. “Their families are dead, their villages are destroyed— Ronon’s entire people are gone, Teyla’s are down to a couple hundred at most and all of her close relatives are gone. I’m the only family they have. I thought, you know what, I can afford it, I’m gettin’ a place where I have room.”

“Are you retiring?” Dave asked.

John chewed his lip. “No,” he said. “Not yet. But it’s something I’m thinkin’ about.” He shrugged, and fuck it, if he was standing here anyway, he’d get started on dishes. He turned the water on to start it getting hot, and started scraping plates into the garbage disposal and stacking them by the sink. “Two more years to my twenty, but if I make Colonel I’ll probably hang on as long as they’ll let me. I just… I’ve had nothing, except the Air Force, for a long time, and I feel like I should have something that’s not theirs. If not for me, then for these guys, who don’t have anything either.”

Dave nodded. John tried to take it as a compliment, as reassuring, that his brother had been checking up on him. That he’d been doing it out of care, and not out of a desire to catch him out. “I just wanted to make sure you’re okay,” Dave said. “And it’s…” He hesitated, fidgeted with his drink.

“Hand me that roasting pan, will ya?” John said. Dave handed it over, and John had a moment to think that Dave had probably never done dishes in his life. “Get a towel, you’re drying.”

“What?” Dave blinked.

John hooked the cabinet door open and pulled out a dish towel and handed it to Dave. “If you’re standing there, you’re drying.”

“Uh,” Dave said. John plugged the drain on one side of the sink and let it start filling with hot soapy water.

“I guess I’m touched you were checkin’ up on me,” John said, “but I’ve been flying combat missions for eighteen years now, and since Nancy I haven’t had a damn thing to spend all that combat and hazard duty pay on. So the money Mom left me just means I don’t need a mortgage on this house, which is a nice leg up, but I’m fine on my own. If you and Dad were waiting for me to come crawling home you’d’ve been waiting indefinitely.”

He filled the roasting pan with hot soapy water and set it on the counter, set the stack of plates into the sink, and threw all the serving spoons into the water to soak.

“It’s not like that,” Dave said, and he didn’t sound angry. John glanced over at him, and he didn’t look angry either. “I know you’re all right. You got a good enough deal on this house that you’ve still got some of that account left over to pay the taxes on the property for a good long while. It’s just that Adele’s been giving me shit.”

“About what?” John asked.

“Dad left you nothing except some boxes of junk and halfhearted apologies,” Dave said. “And he left me with a ridiculous net worth.”

“Hey,” John said, “you stuck around, put up with his bullshit, that’s what you get. I made my choices and I’m fine with them.”

“But it was stupid and petty of him,” Dave said.

John shrugged, and scrubbed at the copper bottom of a saucepan for a moment before rinsing it and handing it to Dave. “When that’s dry it goes on the pot rack,” he said.

Dave rubbed confusedly at it, then hung it up obediently. “I’m just saying,” Dave said.

“Calm your guilt,” John said. “It’s fine. I don’t need any of his money.”

“It’s not _my_ guilt,” Dave said, finally sounding a little annoyed. Good.

John scrubbed out the serving spoons and rinsed them, then handed them to Dave. “Dry those and put ‘em in the canister by the stove.”

Dave took them and did so, inexpertly. John stuck the pile of plates under the rinse water while he scrubbed out the other prep dishes and things that wouldn’t fit into the dishwasher, and handed them to Dave with instructions about putting them away. “I’m just saying,” Dave tried again. “It’s not guilt, it’s that my wife is a very fair-minded person and it’s bothering her, which means it’s bothering me. If you think this is out of some uncharacteristic altruism on my part, it’s not.”

John opened the dishwasher and pulled the racks out, staring down at it to puzzle out how the loading was meant towork. He was pretty drunk, though, so he just stuck the plates in one direction, the salad plates another, crammed the plates from lunch in wherever they’d fit, and dumped the silverware into the basket thing. “So your wife thinks our dad was a jerk,” John said.

“Um,” Dave said, “what are you trying to do?”

“Load the dishwasher,” John said. “What does it look like?”

“Huh,” Dave said. “Um, yeah, I guess. Adele just thinks the family hasn’t done right by you.”

“I’m not much concerned about what the family has or hasn’t done, at this juncture,” John said, pausing to straighten up and look Dave in the face. “I’ve done fine on my own, this whole time. I don’t need anything, I’m not upset about it, I’m not worried about it, I regret that I never had a chance to talk to Dad before the end but that’s it. That’s all, Dave. It’s fine. So if you feel like you don’t deserve all that, or something, donate it to a charity. Set up a scholarship fund in Mom’s name, or something. Start a charity to help veterans with PTSD, that’d be nice, there’s not a lot of resources out there for that kind of thing.”

Dave stared at him for a long moment. “Do you have PTSD?” he asked.

“That’s not the point,” John said, and rinsed out the wineglasses before putting them into the dishwasher’s top rack along with everyone’s eggnog cups from earlier. Dave was still staring at him. “Jesus, Dave, everyone I fucking know has PTSD, and for good fucking reason. You realize all day whenever the doorbell rang here I’ve had somebody just instinctively take my six when I went to the door, and it’s been different people each time? I’m like 99% sure Vala pulled a knife when I reacted with surprise to seeing you. She was waiting right there in case you attacked me, you’d’ve been dead before you saw her. And when the old neighbor lady came over Cam was waiting in the kitchen door with a pleasant expression and his sidearm behind his back. We live our lives in hypervigilance and that’s fine, that’s how it works, Dave. It’s just, you can’t turn that off, and then you don’t sleep anymore.”

“How can you live like that?” Dave asked, faintly horrified-looking and not nearly as unnerved as he should’ve been.

“Because it’s fucking better than _dying_ like that,” John said. “Teyla once kicked a guy’s ass with Torren in her arms. She’s that good, she just used her feet because her hands were full of infant, and the possibility of defeat never even crossed her mind because they would’ve taken her baby. We live like this because someone has to, Dave. When your big corporations lobby for wars this is what happens. A lot of Dad’s money is blood money. You ever think of that?“

“SPL doesn’t make weapons,” Dave said, frowning.

“You know what we’ve done with those generators SPL made us? If you overload ‘em, you can use ‘em like nukes. I know this firsthand, Dave, I’ve dropped ‘em myself.” John fished around under the counter for the powdered dishwasher soap, sprinkled it into the dispenser, and closed up the machine.

“They shouldn’t, though,” Dave said. “They shouldn’t have that kind of power.”

“They do,” John said. “You don’t know what kind of power source we’re hooking ‘em up to. You duct-tape down the switch so they’ll overload, give ‘em about fifteen minutes, they go up like a 30-kiloton nuke. Generate an EMP big enough to send a whole countryside dark. Enough explosive power to level a city the size of Manhattan.”

Dave was staring at him now. John flipped the lever over to “normal wash” and hit the start button, and the dishwasher growled to life with a muted rush under the counter. “What city?” Dave whispered.

“I can’t tell you anything about it,” John said, scrubbing viciously at the roasting pan. He relented. “I didn’t level a city. We just wanted the EMP to take out electronics, I detonated it too high to actually knock any buildings down or kill anybody.”

“SPL doesn’t make weapons,” Dave said again. “We’re focused on power generation. We’ve even stayed out of the blood for oil wars, as best we could. We’ve got connections and investments tied up in it, yeah, but Dad actively tried to minimize that sort of thing. We’re leading the industry in alternative energy. I’m not even feeding you a line, John. It’s not blood money. And if it is, Christ, it’s _your_ blood.”

John bit his lip, scrubbing at a particularly hard crusted-on bit of ham. “Dave,” he said finally. “It’s fine. Give the money to your kids. Endow a chair at a university. Do something useful with it.”

Vala slid into the room and hopped up onto the counter next to John, kicking her feet. “Dearest John,” she said, “you sound like this is too intense a conversation for such a festive occasion. Though if there’s money going spare, you know I would be happy to look after it for you.” She smiled toothily, predatorily at Dave. “Am I too late to help with the dishes? Oh, you both need another drink.”

John grinned at her, grateful for the interruption. “How many weapons you got on you right now?” he asked.

Vala looked innocent, leaning back a little to cross her legs above the knees, pressing her ankle demurely against her calf. “Well,” she said, “some would consider my thighs a weapon, so that’s at least two.” She tapped her lower lip, casting her eyes up thoughtfully. “I don’t have a zat, if that’s what you’re asking,” she concluded, leaning over to impart this confidentiality with considerable gravitas.

“Any knives?” John asked.

She looked shifty. “Why, don’t you have your own? There’s a whole thingy of them, right there.” She gestured at the knife block. “But you always have that one hanging by your bum, it looks so cute— it looks cuter on you than on Cam, you know. Did you lose it? Is that why you’re asking?”

“No, no reason,” John said. He dumped the roasting pan out and rinsed it, then handed it to Dave. “Just set that on top of the stove when it’s dry, it’s gotta go in one of the lower cupboards under a bunch of stuff.”

“Oh,” she said, “we’re almost out of vodka.” She retrieved John a cup and made him a drink in it, then held her hand out for Dave’s glass.

“I’ve had plenty,” Dave said, “thank you.”

“Did you drive yourself here?” John asked. Patrick had always employed a driver.

“I did,” Dave said.

John pulled the plug out of the sink. There were more dishes scattered around but at least he’d put a dent in them. And now he had another drink. “Are you staying?” he asked.

“No,” Dave said, “I can’t, I have to be back in the city tonight. But listen. John. How long are you in town?”

“Two weeks,” John said, “starting day before yesterday, so— whenever that is.”

“Can we set a date to have dinner? Adele and the kids would like to see you. You know Maeve idolizes you. They all ask about you all the time.”

John turned to look at the calendar tacked to the wall— Anna had left it, and it still said July. He flipped it to December. “Bring ‘em here,” he said. “Would that work? Lemme know when you’re free.”

“They’d love to see your house,” Dave said. “We’re in town through the 27th.”

“What, _this_ town?” John hadn’t really expected this answer.

“Yes,” Dave said. He laughed. “I thought it was funny that you bought a house less than an hour away from our main house. We live across town, most of the year.”

“What happened to— the other house?” John asked.

“I’ve sold most of Dad’s properties,” Dave said, “but the main house— I’ve kept it, but the property associated with it is primarily a working farm now. We spend summers there, for now.”

John nodded. “Okay,” he said. “Come over the night of the 26th, then, if you’re not busy.”

“We will,” Dave said. “Here’s my number. Call me and let me know what to bring.” He stuck his card to the corkboard next to the calendar. “Thanks for the drink, and for introducing me to your colleagues. I have a lot to think about, John. But I hope you understand, this isn’t about me feeling guilty, this is about me genuinely wanting to have a brother again. My kids want an uncle. I don’t want our family to keep on like it has been.”

“Huh,” John said, words deserting him. He really didn’t know what to say to that.

“I think it’s great that you’ve found a family,” Dave said. “I think that’s healthy and it makes me feel a lot better to think you’re fine without us, actually. Better that than think how much we’ve let you down your whole life.”

“If I’d been waiting around to be let down, I would’ve starved to death long ago,” John pointed out.

“Exactly,” Dave said. “I just mean— I know Dad expected you to fail, on your own, and I’m glad he was wrong, John. That’s what I mean. He was wrong, he was wrong about everything about you, and I couldn’t be happier about it.”

John wandered to the door with him, watching a little bemusedly as Ronon gave him an enthusiastic farewell. Dave actually hugged John goodbye, and John was drunk enough to take it somewhat gracefully, and then he vanished off the brightly-lit porch into the gloom of the night and was gone.

“Huh,” John said, after he was gone, and shut the door.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm about a thousand percent sure I stole the name of Dave's wife and the name of the Sheppards' utilities-mogul company from aesc or someone, but I don't remember who exactly, or what the fic was. It was just-- probably aesc.


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